Sweat and tears for drum troupe

By Stephen Bevis

7 July 2008 — 10:00am

THEY live on a mountain in monastic isolation, get up at 5am each day to perform a demanding dawn ritual before cooking, cleaning and waiting hand and foot on their occasional guests. They run a half-marathon, followed by a punishing two-hour workout and martial arts training just to warm up for the main task of practising their instruments 10 hours a day.

Monks, hoteliers, soldiers, musicians — the members of Japan's celebrated percussion outfit Drum Tao are in some way an amalgam of all four. There is no performing troupe quite like them in the world.

These exponents of the martial art of taiko drumming live in a secluded community in the verdant Kuju Highlands on Japan's main island of Kyushu. Apart from a herd of Jersey cows and a golf club down the hill, just about their only neighbour is the majestic volcano of Mount Aso, and it isn't going to complain about the noise.

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When they descend from the mountain, it is not with tablets of stone but with muscles of steel that they use to commit assault and battery on their massive drums for shell-shocked audiences around the world.

Tao take their name from the Chinese Kanji character for "way" or "road", and their philosophy is certainly not about taking the path of least resistance.

After touring Japan for 11 years, the group had its international breakthrough at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe with its ferocious mix of dance, drumming and the softer voices of the Japanese flute (shinobue) and horizontal harp (koto). Two years ago, Tao came to Australia for the first time and is back again for a two-month tour.

Taiko is a centuries-old tradition that sprang from festivals and religious events in Japan, such as praying for rain or a good harvest. Supplicants appeal to the gods by channelling their strength through the thunderous voice of the drums.

Its use as entertainment emerged in the 1970s but was taken to another level when former supermarket marketing manager Ikuo Fujitaka founded Tao in 1993. Inspired by the success of Cirque du Soleil, this is high-gloss tradition; an archaic art form wrested from the past and plunged into the showbiz present, complete with micron-precise choreography, impressive lighting and merchandise in the foyer. The dichotomy between the past and the ambitious future becomes apparent with a visit to Grandioso, Tao's home base about two hours' drive from Kyushu's biggest city of Fukuoka.

As the suburbs recede and the roads narrow, the view gives way to thickly forested mountains cloaked in a misty rain. This is the serene rural Japan seen in prints by Hokusai or Hiroshige. The whimsy is shaken on my arrival, when the 20 young performers emerge to welcome me and grab my luggage. They do not look much like the nuggetty ascetics I had imagined. Dressed mainly in black, almost all of them have the power-socket hairdos of the cyber-punks of Tokyo's Shinjuku district.

Their boss, Fujitaka, has the charisma and zeal of a sect leader and it is clear they would do just about anything for him.

A former champion in gymnastics, kendo, judo and marathon running, Fujitaka says he never lost a sporting competition, a claim he makes between drags on his 19th cigarette of the day. He has transferred his competitive spirit into running perhaps the toughest performing arts boot camp in the world. "To be truly professional I thought it was important to be like monks in a solitary place for the artists to come together as a team," he says. "I tell our trainees, 'You are slaves. You can have no money, no girlfriends, no boyfriends and definitely no drinking or smoking'. For the trainees, it is like Hell."

Asked what it was like being a trainee, one drummer looked sheepishly at his smog-plumed boss and said: "I thought I would die within a year."

In Tao's first 10 years, 400 novices ran away. Fujitaka subsequently turned down the heat in his domain and cut the drop-out rate to 40 in the past five years. "People leave now not because the training is too tough but because their performance is not good enough," he says.

More than 100 applicants bang on the door of the Grandioso each year. Only two or three make the grade after rigorous tests of their physical and mental endurance, drumming skills and capacity to live with the others. "It is the biggest problem to find the best combination of people to work together as a team," Fujitaka says.

Each day begins before dawn with a performance to greet the sun as it peeps above a distant mountain range. (Fujitaka puts great store in reinforcing the taiko's traditional links to ritual and the celebration of nature.)

The Tao team of 13 men and seven women then go on a 20-kilometre run on the lower slopes of nearby Mount Kuju. Grandioso sits about 1000 metres above sea level.

After making their traditional cooked Japanese breakfast, they do two hours of muscle training — 200 push-ups, 200 sit-ups and 200 squats — and martial arts followed by 10 hours of drum and choreography practice.

At 10pm, after their other household chores are done and they have had a communal bath (separate baths for men and women), the Tao team finally sit down for supper. At midnight the kitchen is still busy with the clatter of washing up and preparations for the breakfast they will eat after another 5am start.

This goes on for three years until they are considered ready to go on stage. Talk about suffering for their art.

Taro Harasaki has been performing with Tao for three years and has had plenty of injuries to show for his labours, including a broken wrist and collapsed neck vertebrae from the strap of a 35-kilogram drum that he hoists around the stage.

Harasaki, 29, used to be a drummer in a rock band that played Ramones and Sex Pistols songs. He had planned to be a liquor merchant until he was hooked by a Drum Tao ad on TV.

The hard work and living in each other's pockets is vital to its success, he says. "We can understand each other even without saying anything."

BEFORE dinner the performers put on a heart-thumping show for their two guests. Dominating the stage are three giant daiko drums, weighing 400 kilograms and 1.5 metres in diameter. Each has been carved from a big tree and covered with the stretched hide of a pregnant cow (a normal cowhide wouldn't make the span). You could buy a house for the price of each one, says Tao's international manager, Emma Sato. Japanese homes are not cheap.

The drummers pound out salvoes with cudgels ranging in size from a half broomstick to a rolled-up weekend newspaper and a baseball bat. They don't just play the drums. They do the splits, leap, shout and toss their legs, arms and torsos about in a way that could be seen as wild abandon if it wasn't so highly synchronised.

"Their muscles are part of the costume," Sato says of the drummers' sculpted bodies set against the drum-skins and sidelights. "The muscles are important to make a big sound on the drum but also to make a good picture on the stage," adds Fujitaka. "They train hard and have a confidence in their bodies and it is important to stress that in the show."

Arisa Nishi is one of seven female Tao drummers and has been with the company since she was 11. Diminutive off-stage, Nishi revels in testing her muscle-power against the men and seems to grow 10 centimetres when she gets up to bang her drum. Her feet lift from the floor with the force of her blows. "The boys have more power but I have an energy that the men don't have — women's power," she says. The group's leader, Yoshinori Suito, 35, the first mate to Fugitaka's captain, has been at Drum Tao since the start. Suito was a guitarist in a punk band until he saw taiko drumming and promptly used all his savings to pay for a trip to Africa to study with djembe drummers in Senegal.

He has two families: his drumming brothers and sisters at Grandioso, and a wife and young daughter he rarely sees in Fukuoka. "I feel very sorry for my real family," he says, conceding that the pain of separation is offset by the big pay packet he gets each month.

Is Fujitaka-san a good boss? "I am a boyfriend to the girls and big brother to the boys." He throws his head back and laughs. "We all respect each other. We all want to do our best together."

Drum Tao, at Her Majesty's Theatre, July 11 and 12 (book on 132 849) followed by regional shows.